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Guest column: A different 9/11 anniversary

By Paul Dougan

Posted:
09/28/2013 01:00:00 AM MDT

It happened 40 years ago: a U.S.-backed military coup in Chile. Chileans had elected a socialist president, Salvador Allende; his government had nationalized some U.S. businesses operating in Chile, particularly the properties of IT&T and Anaconda and Kennecott Copper. The Nixon Administration, encouraged by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, wanted Allende gone. On Sept. 11 1973, it happened. Led by General Augusto Pinochet, conservative Chileans, with the help of our CIA, overthrew Chilean democracy. One of the great crimes of modern history, it's rich in lessons.

As Americans, we're taught that capitalism and democracy go hand in hand, and that's what our foreign policy promotes: capitalist democracy. So, what happens when Third World elections produce socialism and Washington must choose between capitalism and democracy? Washington usually opts for capitalist dictatorship -- a thuggish fascism known as the "national-security state." The point: when Third World democracy stops supporting capitalism, big U.S. capitalists -- and, thus, Washington -- stop supporting democracy.

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And, yes, that same disloyalty can be found in U.S. history. Enter one Smedley D. Butler, U.S. Marine Corps General, and during the time of FDR's New Deal, the most decorated soldier in America. According to Leatherneck, magazine of the U.S.MC, prominent American industrialists approached Butler and asked him to participate in a military coup against Roosevelt, the "class traitor." Butler heroically betrayed them, but the point is, for the nation's wealthiest one percent, Roosevelt had strayed too far left; they preferred fascism.

According to the cliché "free enterprise means freedom," dismantle the public sector, privatize everything, and freedom will flourish. Well, the conservative economist Milton Friedman and his University of Chicago colleagues thought so, and General Pinochet had them run the Chilean economy, but poverty and unemployment increased, and the ultra-conservative laissez faire policies of the "Chicago Boys" became the economic counterpart of Pinochet's repression.

Americans often misunderstand our foreign policy due to three false paradigms: 1) We're engaged in national self-defense, 2) We're a world cop keeping the "bad guys" in check, and 3) We're a promoter of democracy and human rights -- as the Navy commercial puts it, "A force for Good."

The first is a faulty analogy that sees our current foreign policy as a replay of WW II, where we're pitted against a formidable foe trying to conquer us. Yet, no one argues that Allende's Chile posed a military threat, and in our foreign wars since 1945, we usually haven't picked on someone our own size but have waged neocolonial wars in underdeveloped countries where we often have a ten-to-one kill ratio. As for the John Wayne, Magnificent Seven, world-cop-on-the-beat paradigm, it's misleading, and in Chile, there was no conflict to police, no "hapless victims" to protect from local "bad guys" : Chileans had settled their differences democratically, the way a civilized nation is supposed to. And, of course, the U.S. didn't act as a champion of democracy and human rights -- Pinochet was a cruel dictator.

The paradigm that does work here is America as a modern Rome -- the empire/plantation model. We dominate the Third World economically, politically and militarily; to Henry Kissinger and our wealthy one percent, Chile or any nation that withdraws from this defacto U.S. empire is a slave who's fled the plantation; a nation that nationalizes U.S. holdings is a slave that's fled with property. That slave must be recovered and taught a lesson, and no amount of brutality is too extreme.

Washington's rhetoric about human-rights abuses in such "escaped" countries is a pretext for the real issue: they've gone socialist or nationalized U.S. companies; their economies no longer serve U.S. corporations. Yes, there are abuses in Cuba, a one-party state where dissidents can be jailed, perhaps beaten. Yet, Cuban abuses pale next to those of "free" U.S.-created national-security states. In Chile, tens of thousands were arrested and tortured; thousands were murdered and buried in secret graves -- all for purely political reasons.

As a nation, we have a real problem: we run the largest empire/plantation the world has ever known, and we're in complete denial about it. We prefer reliving WW II to dealing with reality. We prefer self-serving "patriotic" lies to painful "unpatriotic" truths.

Paul Dougan lives in Lafayette; he had Chilean friends tortured by Pinochet.

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